ToorCamp Call For Papers/participation

March 29, 2009 by Eliot 6 Comments

We’ve been watching and waiting intently as ToorCamp comes together. It’s a four day hacker conference that will be held in a Washington state missile silo July 2nd-5th. While we’re excited about this debut event, its success depends entirely on those presenting. The call for papers is currently open and they’ve got a number of formats available: 20 and 50 minute talks and 1 and 2 day workshops. They’re also looking for people to organize campsites and are offering discounts for groups. We’re encouraging you to submit your talk since we’d love to see more hardware talks. You can follow @ToorCamp announcements on Twitter.

Tweet-a-Watt Kits

March 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 41 Comments

[adafruit] wrote in to let us know that the Tweet-a-Watt is now available in kit form. While the plans have been available for a while, a kit is a welcomed addition. The kit doesn’t include the Kill-a-Watt monitor, but rather the XBee adapters and parts necessary to make it talk to your Arduino or computer. The kit is $90, while the Kill-a-Watt can be found for roughly $20.

Curiosity Killed The Twit, Twitter Clickjacking

February 12, 2009 by Eliot 24 Comments

Twitter was flooded this morning with users posting “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6”. TinyURL has since terminated the URL. The original page doesn’t seem to be live either. It displayed a button that said “Don’t Click”. If the user happened to be logged into Twitter, it would automatically update their status. The instigator partially describes the method on his blog (translated). The page would load the user’s Twitter page in an invisible iframe. The status would be pasted in and the “Don’t Click” button is placed on top of the update button. You can find the code snippets here and the original author credits this post for the inspiration. Twitter has since added a JavaScript fragment to each page to break out of iframes.

if (window.top !== window.self) { window.top.location.href = window.self.location.href; }

Wattcher, Twittering Kill A Watt Plans Posted

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

You probably saw [Phillip Torrone] and [Limor Fried]’s twittering Kill A Watt earlier this week. It was an entry in the Core77/Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We saw a little bit about how it was assembled, but now they’ve posted a full guide to assembling the hardware. Each Kill A Watt gets an XBee radio that transmits back to a receiver that logs the power usage. The difficult part when putting this design together was the XBee required 50mA when transmitting. This is well above the Kill A Watt’s internal power supply. They remedied this by adding a 10,000uF supercap to act as a rechargeable battery. The daily twittering is just a side-effect of the project. The Kill A Watts transmit every 2 seconds, so you’ll get a very accurate report of your power usage. This is a great project for renters who can’t permanently modify their power infrastructure. Each Kill A Watt can support quite a few appliances since they’re rated for 15A, ~1800W.

Brute Force Attack On Twitter

January 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKNbggNJMVI]

Wired Threat Level has posted an interview with the hacker who recently broke into several high profile twitter accounts, such as Fox News, and Barack Obama. Since we know how much you all love twitter, we thought you might want to learn more about it. Apparently he used a brute force method to get into a member of the support team. The password was “happiness” which was cracked pretty quickly. This might be a good time to review your own strategies to prevent brute force attacks.

Twitter IRC Server, Tircd

January 5, 2009 by Eliot 22 Comments

tircd is an ircd proxy for talking to the Twitter API. It should work with any standard IRC client. After running the Perl script, you authenticate to the IRC server using your Twitter username as your /nick. Join the room #twitter and the /topic will be set to your last update. Any message you type will update Twitter and the room’s topic. All of the people you are following show up in the room as users and post messages as they tweet. If you private message one of them, it will become a direct message on Twitter. Other commands work too: /whois to get a person’s bio, /invite to start following, and /kick to unfollow. The project is brand new and will be added new features in the future like Search API support. Follow @tircd for updates.

Twittering Washing Machine

January 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 34 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkMXpKmRXvU&fmt=18]

If you don’t have at least one twittering appliance in your household, you’re getting behind. The latest addition to the spread is a twittering washing machine. [Ryan] tells us that he kept accidentally forgetting to retrieve his clothing from the washing machine, resulting in smelly mildewy clothes. Now, his washing machine twitters to announce it is done. It also has a sign in the house that displays its status to help him remember. We’ve seen unborn babies and toasters twitter, what’s left? Remember those refrigerators that were supposed to let you know that you’re out of certain food? Why don’t we see a twittering fridge yet?